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Peter Douben, PhD is an environment expert with more than 30 years’ experience in research, industry and consultancy services, focussing on the fate and effect of chemicals in the environment.

He is Director and Founder of REACHWise, a consultancy focussed on REACH, CLP and Biocides, supporting a global downstream end user of chemicals with ensuring the chemicals compliance with REACH in the client’s products and development of mitigation strategies. This also covers defining R&D programmes with the focus on chemical aspects of sustainability activities.

In the context of Brexit the company also provides Only Representative services for the UK. It continues to support companies in EU27/EEA but also from elsewhere in the world when they face regulatory issues for their chemicals to the UK and EU.

Before REACHWise, Peter he was Director REACH/Chemicals Policy in Cefic, the European Chemical Industry Council, during which he was responsible for the implementation of REACH, and as such he was involved in several REACH Implementation Projects (RIPs). He led the Project Management Groups on the guidance for information requirements on intrinsic properties of substances, and the one on carrying out the chemical safety assessment.

Prior to this he was Head of Environmental Protection in Unilever and served on many industry bodies in Europe and North America.

Chris France is a Visiting Professor in the Centre for Environment and Sustainability (CES). He founded the forerunner programme to the PDS back in 1993 and ran the EPSRC’s longest funded EngD programme. He has consulted for a number of universities in running such industry-facing research programmes (including, Imperial, UCL, Cambridge and Bristol) and was one of the EPSRC’s ‘EngD Advocates’ for many years. Chris succeeded Roland Clift as Director of the Centre for Environment and Sustainability and later in his career founded Surrey’s Doctoral College which oversaw the admission, skills training and progress of a population of 1,000 doctoral students and represented the interests of nearly 500 early career researchers. 

Chris believes that the essence of practitioner doctorates is to fulfil two objectives:

1. Train ‘work ready’ graduates in the state of the art (both theory and practice) of their discipline (in this case sustainability)
2. Undertake research that directly benefits the industrial sponsor whilst demonstrating excellent academic outcomes. The Surrey EngD diaspora since 1997 clearly shows this approach to be a success.

The repeat business from sponsors attests to the value that they derive from their participation. As an academic, Chris supported the CES submission to Research Excellence Frameworks on three occasions by citing papers written with EngD researchers and their industrial supervisors.

The value of tight cohorts, tailored training, high intellectual aspirations along with regular monitoring and tensioning, are key to maintaining the effectiveness of these programmes. This approach has given CES/Surrey an enviable niche. It requires active management (as much of supervisors as candidates) to avoid the otherwise inevitable degeneracy into a series of unlinked PhDs based more in the University.

Chris is an established business leader drawing on experience spanning renewable energy, transport, the natural environment, water, regeneration, construction and government policy. In 2019 he co-founded strategy and sustainability consultancy Accelar Limited to help accelerate the clean growth transition.

He has a strong interest in eco-innovation and investment, for example as an advisor to the Green Finance Institute’s Coalition for the Energy Efficiency of Buildings (CEEB), as a member of the EIC’s Sustainable Smart Cities Taskforce and as a member of the Clean Growth Forum for the Enterprise M3 Local Enterprise Partnership. Chris is a Chartered Director and Fellow of the Institute of Directors. His previous roles include leadership positions with Ramboll UK, Temple Group, AEA Technology and the Transport Research Laboratory.

As a member of the Executive Committee for over 7 years and most recently as President, Adrian led the work on SAI Platform’s Vision, Mission and Strategies. Now in the role of Director General, Adrian is driving these strategies and developing the organisation to reach a sustainable future for agriculture on a global scale.

During a career of over 33 years with Mars Incorporated, Adrian has led positive change across various areas and in many roles: most recently as one of the leading architects of the Mars Sustainable in a Generation Plan. He is an experienced public speaker and a highly experienced manager, who takes a value-driven approach to creating a culture, ethos and team that thrive on improvement and empowerment.

Adrian holds a BSc Honours degree from London University in Mathematics and Physics. He is a member of the board of governors for the Dairy Sustainability Framework, the Advisory board for the Quantis Geofootprint Tool, the Advisory Board for the Surrey University Practitioner Doctorate in Sustainability and an Ambassador for the Positive Innovation Club.

Responsible for leading integration of life cycle thinking and sustainability science development within Unilever and supporting Unilever’s Compass ambitions and implementation across the business. Thirty years of experience working in industry and participated in various multi-stakeholder and expert working groups.

Experienced in environmental reporting and the development and implementation of impact assessment methods in industry and use of scientific data for communication and claims support. Current research areas include integration of planetary boundary thinking and science into decision-making, improving understanding of variability and uncertainty in life cycle assessment and product footprinting.